Leave it to Detroit to be gentrified by people who don’t own a hill of beans. The latest immigrants to Detroit are not flocking here to find abandoned properties to flip. They’re not coming to hoard land for a future industrial park. And they’re definitely not coming here to push up the rents in troubled neighborhoods or turn blight into a tourist attraction. They are coming to be urban farmers planting healthy harvest of – of all things—hope.
I met one new Detroiter while she was tending to a community garden called Feedom Freedom Growers on the city’s east side. Jessi Quizar, 25, grew up in Denver, and went to graduate school in Los Angeles. She’s working on her Ph.D. in American Studies.But she believes that her real classroom is in a modest plot beside the home of Feedom Freedom Growers founders Wayne and Myrtle Thompson Curtis.
“This is where I want to be,” said Jessi. She’s even been looking to buy a house nearby. “I love the folks here. This feels like the kind of community that I want to be in for a long, long time.”
It’s been awhile since I’ve met someone who voluntarily left a city like L.A. to live in an unstable Detroit neighborhood and help sow the seeds of change. But Jessi isn’t alone. These days the city is teeming with 20- and 30-somethings who are attracted to the land and the Detroiters who farm it. Jessi said that Detroiters are doing something through urban farming that no other city is doing. They’ve decided that the solution to their problems is not attracting major corporations to come in and save them, she said. Instead, they are taking leadership into their own hands, taking stock of their assets, and saving themselves.
“We have resources, we have people, we have knowledge, we have an incredible history of organizing in Detroit, and we have a lot of land,” said Jessi. “Urban agriculture involves very, very localized kinds of economies where people are able to build up a certain kind of cooperative way of engaging with each other to provide the things that are necessary for life.”
Lest you think I’ve sipped the Kool-Aid, I haven’t traded in my skepticism of urban agriculture for a hoe. I love to garden, I swoon at the smell of fresh herbs and have been known to bite into a big, sun-warmed tomato right off of the vine. But there’s no way that agriculture is the future for Detroit—not economically speaking. Unless our future economic model is slavery.
I pushed Jessi on this subject and she agreed: “Yeah, well some of the worst paid and most food insecure people in this county work in agriculture. And living in California, you can really see that the industrial agricultural system in this country is very, very exploitative of its workers. That’s not a step up.”
What IS a step up, she said, are small family- or community-run gardens. The micro focus has the potential for a more long term pay-off than the corporate model: repair of the city’s social fabric.
What they are really planting, said Myrtle, is a revolution in values.
These days, the nonprofit Greening of Detroit provides support to more than 875 urban gardens in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park through its Garden Resource Program. And many of those gardens are attracting young, hopeful talent like Jessi, who have come here to learn about community empowerment.
She may be right: A hopeful future is budding in Detroit.
Watch this video as I explore the topic more deeply on Public Television's Need to Know: "Seeds of Progress."
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